Two leading voices at the intersection of evangelical theological education and technology are calling on seminary faculty globally to grapple seriously with artificial intelligence as a force already reshaping how students learn, write and reason — while insisting that the spiritual formation at the heart of theological education is something no machine can replicate.
At an international webinar titled "AI Disruption and the Future of Theological Education,” they examined both the practical and theological dimensions of AI in seminary training.
The International Council for Evangelical Theological Education (ICETE) hosted the online session through its Technology and Innovation in Learning Impact Team, gathering more than 70 educators from different regions to hear from Dr. Walker Tzeng, executive director of the World Evangelical Theological Institute Association (WETIA) and vice president of Olivet University, and Dr. John Dyer, professor and dean of educational technology at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS).
Tzeng offered a technical overview of how generative AI actually functions, while Dyer worked from biblical narrative outward, tracing a theological framework for evaluating the technology. A structured conversation followed, covering five themes: practical teaching advice, student AI literacy, ethical concerns, beneficial and harmful uses, and implications for curriculum.
What AI is — and what it cannot be
Tzeng, who has worked in the field of theology and technology for nearly two decades and previously discussed AI's educational implications in an interview with Christian Daily International, opened by demystifying how large language models operate. Rather than thinking or reasoning in any human sense, he explained, these systems work by statistically predicting which word is most likely to follow the last — an iterative process that produces coherent-sounding text without genuine understanding behind it.
"It's taking relative mathematics and saying, this word is close to this word, and so I'm going to produce that word," Tzeng said. He illustrated the point with a simple example: if a model encounters the word "king," it calculates that "queen" is a statistically proximate token. "They're different but closer to one another," he said. "This is how AI really understands the nuances of your prompt."
That mechanical process, he argued, has a ceiling that has significant implications for theological educators. AI can synthesize large volumes of existing material rapidly and produce fluent, well-structured prose. It can also process ideas and correlate them across sources at speed. But it cannot originate thought, draw on lived faith, or produce the kind of writing that emerges from a person's relationship with God, their church community, and Scripture.
"When we do write something, we draw from Scripture, or personal experience, we have our spiritual life or church community or peer review," Tzeng said. "We are also people that repent. We have faith and we have love and we draw from that as we do our theology." AI, operating as a statistical engine, has no access to any of that.
Because AI cannot have a relationship with Jesus Christ, the content it generates will always be an imitation of human theological writing rather than an expression of it. "AI knowledge is always going to be a reconstruction, an imitation," he said. "When students create writing, they're not just reconstituting other people's work — they're also living out the embodied human life in their faith, and AI can't do that."
That, Tzeng argued, is not a reason to dismiss the technology but to understand it accurately. He described AI as a capable research assistant for someone who already knows their subject — useful for processing and synthesizing existing material, less useful for generating genuine insight. "It's great as a research assistant," he said. "If I really know my area and I'm putting something in and processing it, giving it instructions to process it, it really helps put all of that language together for us."
Interpreting the use of AI through the lens of the biblical narrative
Dyer approached the same questions from the opposite direction, starting with Scripture and tracing its implications toward the technological present.
He walked through five “chapters” in the overarching biblical story — creation, the image of God, the fall, the life of Jesus, and the new creation — drawing out what each contributes to a Christian account of technology and its risks.
In Genesis, Dyer pointed to the dual mandate God gives humanity: to fill the earth and to cultivate and tend it. He described these as two poles — innovation and preservation — that together define what responsible making looks like. Tool use and creativity are not responses to the fall, he argued; they are part of the original vocation. "When my kids were little, I would give them a box of Legos and ask them to make things, and I delight in the things that they make," Dyer said. "I think God in some ways delights in the things that we make as well."
On the image of God, Dyer outlined three categories that theologians have used: the substantive (the capacity to reason), the functional (the call to exercise dominion over creation), and the relational (the unique bond between humanity, one another, and God). AI, he noted, can appear to encroach on the first two — it can process information faster than humans and, in some cases, manage tasks more efficiently. That can feel threatening. But the third category, he said, remains untouched. "Our unique relationship with God is unique — AIs don't have that," he said. "As good as they are at mimicking a lot of what humans do, they aren't really a 'they' in that sense."
Dyer named a related pastoral concern: the risk of people forming what feels like a deep relationship with an AI system while their relationships with other people and with God quietly fall away. "We want to be able to work on that with folks and help them to move toward relationships with humans and with God," he said.
The fall introduces a recurring temptation: to use the things we make as substitutes for God rather than as expressions of faithful service. Dyer connected this directly to AI. "The temptation we face in some sense with AI right now is to have powers beyond our own ability — to be something more than human, and not to be God's image bearers, but to go beyond that." The same serpent who promised in Genesis that humans would become like God, he suggested, speaks in the aspirations of those who see AI as a route to transcending human limitation.
He also drew on Deuteronomy 22's instruction that builders place a parapet, a low guardrail, along the edge of flat-roofed houses, where people slept. The provision addressed potential accidental harm: those who build are responsible for thinking through how what they build might hurt someone. "In the age of AI, we want to be building guardrails as well," Dyer said.
He then pointed to Luke 2, where a young Jesus grows in wisdom through questioning and being questioned. Even the eternal Son of God, by taking on humanity, submitted to the ordinary process of human development. "What the temptation for us is in the age of AI is that some of the usage of technology can skip that growth and we get right to results, we get right to answers, but we don't become wise in that," Dyer said. "All we have is information."
He also noted that the Greek word for carpenter — tektōn, used of Jesus' earthly trade — is the root of the English word "technology." The maker of all things was, in his earthly life, also a craftsman: someone who learned from his heavenly Father and his earthly father, and who made things by hand.
Looking ahead to the final chapter of the biblical story, Dyer pointed to the new creation as further evidence that human making matters to God. The vision in Revelation of a holy city with its roads, gates, and the accumulated work of human hands suggests that what people create is not simply discarded at the end of history but redeemed and reformed within it.
"Human making is still a big part of us in the garden, in the era of sin, through redemption, and even in the future," Dyer said. "The things that we make and create are important to God so much that he wants to save our souls, resurrect our bodies, but also redeem and reform the things that we make." For theological educators, he argued, that vision gives human creativity, including the responsible use of technology, a weight and dignity that extends all the way to eternity.
Practical advice for classrooms and institutions
On the question of practical teaching, Dyer argued that the most important intervention theological educators can make is to keep the purpose of seminary formation consistently in front of students, before any conversation about AI policy begins.
He described a practice at DTS of telling prospective students that if they are coming primarily to acquire information, they can likely find it elsewhere for free. The real reason to come to seminary, he said, is to be transformed. "The goal is not to make the best chart of Leviticus possible," he said, describing a typical assignment. "The goal is to become the kind of person who's made a chart of Leviticus — who's really had that become part of who they are. So in that moment when you are with somebody who is hurting, you sort of just bleed out Bible and bleed out theology."
Dyer recommended that educators also distinguish between different types of AI use rather than addressing the technology in broad strokes. Generating ideas, producing an outline, drafting text, and editing text are meaningfully different activities. He suggested faculty specify which of these are permitted in their classrooms and why, and communicate the consequences clearly. At DTS, he said, the faculty has worked to give professors email templates they can use to open a dialogue with students whose work seems inconsistent — asking questions before making accusations.
Tzeng added a structural suggestion: reduce assignment word counts. Because AI excels at generating long, fluent essays, he argued, shorter prompts — 150 or 500 words rather than several thousand — force students to develop and compress their own thinking rather than delegating volume to a machine. "If you shorten it up, it actually forces the student to really dig in deep and form what they thought," he said. He also recommended that educators raise their grading standards on the assumption that students have AI available. If AI can produce text that reads at a doctoral level, grading students at their previous standard may no longer reflect what genuine mastery looks like.
He further suggested helping students understand how AI works at a basic level, arguing that students who grasp the statistical nature of these systems are less likely to over-trust them. Related to this, he called for practical training in recognizing AI-generated errors, or "hallucinations": "I think we probably need training sessions, a class or a seminar, in this area of just ways to pump out false information on it and then show the students, and then get them trained in a way that helps them recognize when it comes out false or not."
The ethics of presenting oneself as able
On ethical questions, Dyer reframed the issue beyond the historic issue of plagiarism, which he described as primarily a concern about theft of another's ideas, toward a different kind of dishonesty: misrepresenting one's own capabilities.
"In the age of AI, probably what we're talking about more is presenting yourself as able to do something that you really can't do," he said. "If you're saying, 'I'm able to synthesize this idea' or 'I'm able to write this paper' when you really can't, that's where I think we're crossing an ethical boundary."
He applied the same logic to the professors. Using AI to grade student work without disclosing it means educators are presenting themselves as doing something they are not.
DTS has also been working through a case that illustrates the complexity: the seminary offers courses in English, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. For some language communities it uses subtitles on English-language recordings. When Dyer's team began experimenting with AI voice generation as a substitute for subtitles, it created a situation where a professor appeared to be speaking fluently in a language they do not know.
"If we're asking our students not to present themselves as able to do something they can't, but then we're having a professor being translated into another voice and literally presenting themselves as doing something they cannot do, that has some real conflict there," Dyer said. He added a further concern: relying on AI-translated English-language professors could slow the development of theologians who are native speakers of those languages — a cost the wider church would eventually bear.
Tzeng named AI-generated citations as the most widespread integrity problem he has observed. Because of how large language models work, he explained, they cannot reliably produce accurate references. When asked to generate a literature survey with citations, an AI will often fabricate sources, misattribute quotations, or cite real works incorrectly. "It'll even take a quotation and make it so that it's not exactly what the author said," he said. "And so in that sense, you're not properly quoting that."
Where AI helps, and where it distorts
Both speakers identified areas of genuine benefit. Dyer described the shift from search-engine-based research to conversational AI as a significant change in how students and scholars access information — one that can be productive, provided the tools being used link to verifiable sources. He described practical automation uses at DTS: extracting data from PDFs into usable formats, and drafting initial replies to high volumes of student emails during registration periods. In the second case, a human reviews the AI-drafted response before it is sent, reducing administrative load while preserving human judgment at the point of contact with students.
"We're able to serve our students better," he said. "Paying a little bit of money for an AI subscription versus an entire person in those really high moments — we're actually reducing the cost of education as a whole."
Tzeng noted that AI has been particularly useful for international students writing in English as a second language, helping them produce cleaner prose than they might otherwise manage. He was quick, however, to identify a corresponding harm: many of those same students now spend more time, not less, working on their writing as they end up focusing on refining AI-generated text rather than developing their own voice. The result can become visible when those students preach. "If you are giving a sermon, you should really have your own voice in it," he said. "But someone's delivering a sermon and it just sounds like AI as they're delivering it — it's not very good."
Dyer framed the beneficial and harmful uses of AI in terms of a spectrum running from full automation on one end to full preservation on the other. Tasks that are purely administrative or mechanical can appropriately be automated; tasks that form the person doing them should be protected.
He argued that theological education, as a discipline, belongs largely on the preservation side of that spectrum, particularly while students are still developing foundational skills. "When we move over into automation, that's where we start to lose a skill because we're giving that over to a machine to do," he said. The hard work of theological formation, in his view, is exactly the kind of labor that should not be made easier.
Curriculum and the decade ahead
On longer-term curriculum implications, Dyer maintained that the core disciplines of theological training, such as biblical literacy, synthesis, discernment, pastoral judgment, are the ones that matter most and are least amenable to automation.
"When you're facing someone in a hospital and they're asking you a difficult question, you can't turn to GPT in that moment," he said. "The goal of our instruction is love," he added, citing Paul's statement in 1 Timothy. "It is not papers."
The challenge is keeping the main purpose of formation in front of students even while acknowledging that once they are in ministry, AI tools may genuinely help them work more efficiently. The distinction he drew is between the developmental period, where the discipline of doing hard things matters, and vocational practice, where appropriate automation of secondary tasks frees time for direct ministry.
Tzeng suggested that emerging "agentic AI" (systems capable of completing multi-step tasks autonomously) could eventually assist with the burden of grading, which he described as one of the most time-consuming aspects of faculty work. An agentic system could potentially evaluate a student paper multiple times using different parameters and average the results, giving faculty a richer picture of the work.
He also offered a measure of reassurance for theological educators who may feel overwhelmed by the pace of change: his research suggests that theology, along with philosophy, is among the disciplines much less exposed to AI disruption compared to fields like mathematics or computer programming. The reason, he argued, connects to the nature of theological knowledge itself. "We gain our knowledge from God," he said. "We don't gain knowledge just from reiterating what everyone else is doing."
A tool, not a replacement
The webinar is part of the ongoing work of the Technology and Innovation in Learning Impact Team within ICETE. Tzeng, who serves on the group's steering committee alongside David Turnbull, who moderated the session, and others, described its aim in his earlier interview with Christian Daily International as equipping theological educators for a post-digital world. They seek to do that by providing practical tools as well as fostering the theological reflection needed to use those tools wisely.
Following the presentations, participants moved into smaller breakout groups to discuss how the issues raised applied in their own institutional contexts. The session's recording will been made available for educators who were unable to attend.
For Tzeng, the essential starting point has not changed from what he said in the previous interview with Christian Daily International: clarity about what AI actually is must come before any decision about how to use it.
"A lot of people interact with AI as if it's a human," he said at that time. "But it's not — it's a tool. And we, as people made in God's image, have the responsibility to use it well."
